Performance of a service is often an important factor in deciding the growth, competitiveness and profitability of a business utilizing or offering that service. Specifically, as more and more businesses depend on on-line services for their growth and sustenance, the domain of performance monitoring and optimization of automated systems providing these services has emerged as a key area of research and development. Generally, it is observed that peak loads affect services adversely and result in user requests being rejected or unanswered thereby, hurting customer satisfaction and business growth. Moreover, expensive resources installed to meet peak loads remain underutilized during lean periods making it difficult for businesses to justify the costs of their procurement and maintenance.
The current techniques available for optimizing the performance of a service focus on tuning the system to judiciously use the existing resources or on adding new resources on demand to maintain an acceptable quality of service. For example, for on-line services, mechanisms such as memory caching or adding web servers are used to improve the performance of the system to attain desired levels. Despite the high costs incurred in setting up such infrastructure necessary to meet specified performance criteria, sudden spikes in service requests still lead to high levels of loads that cannot be managed by the service leading to frequent “down times.”.
Hence, there is a need for a method and a system of performance optimization that does not rely on adding more resources to meet the performance and scalability needs of a service. The method and the system should optimize the performance of a service platform using existing resources and at the same time continue to meet a set of base Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that are mandatory for the service. An SLA is a contract or a part of a service contract shared with the consumer of the service, in which the levels of availability, responsiveness and quality of service, in various scenarios, are formally defined.